Someone who is paid to find evidence of environmental catastrophes would probably find them more often than someone whose pay doesn't depend on finding them. That's something to keep in mind when you read environmental reporting on Climategate. Any large news organization, such as the Associated Press, has reporters assigned to cover environmental issues. The agenda in environmental reporting is that humans are damaging the planet, and the role of the reporter is to wake people up to the damage. Otherwise, the beat would not be justified. For example, here's how the New York Times explains its Dot Earth blog: "By 2050 or so, the world population is expected to reach nine billion, essentially adding two Chinas to the number of people alive today. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where, scientists say, humans are already shaping climate and the web of life."" It's not hard to see what the point is — humans are a plague on the planet, and overpopulation is the problem. This is the discredited enviro-Malthusian view that prompted discredited doomsayer Paul Ehrlich to make his famous bet with Julian Simon that the price of five metals — selected by Ehrlich — would rise as demand increased. Ehrlich lost. A field based on the premise that humans are ruining the planet is naturally going to attract reporters who think that way. They talk to like-minded scientists, they talk to each other, they talk to Greenpeace, with a token skeptic or two thrown in to give the pretension of balance. (The Climategate "scientists" also let Greenpeace help write a letter to a newspaper on global warming). So the output of these environmental reporters is generally swayed toward the most alarmist views. Global warming is the poster child. (Skepticism does not mean disbelief, by the way. It means you don't take something at face value. It means you look at all sides of an issue and remember that the burden of proof is on those making the claim, such as man-caused global warming. And if the evidence is insufficient to meet the burden of proof, you say, "Sorry, come back again when you've got more information." That is my personal belief about AGW for the time being. I'll trust the science again when the fraudulent climate scientists are rooted out and skeptics welcomed as an essential part of the scientific process.) Climategate has validated the skeptical position on AGW. So these environmental journalists, who have published story after story about impending doom, can either downplay Climategate as much as possible or take it seriously as a real scandal, which would call their previous reporting into question. Guess which coursemost are taking? And with the mondo politico/enviro bash of the Copenhagen summit just ahead, Climategate couldn't come at a worse time. Environmental journalists are going to descend on the city in droves to warn the world of the dangers of AWG. They'll attend events, receptions, parties, and just play stenographer. What could be easier? But Climategate might actually force them to do some real work, and ask awkward questions of those who say man-caused global warming has with certainty been proven a global threat. If they're too diligent, they'll be ostracized as a "skeptic". That's why you're not going to see much skeptical coverage from environmental reporters at Copenhagen. A story from Copenhagen by AP reporters Charles J. Hanley and Jan M. Olsen breaks out the knee-pads for the summit, without once mentioning Climategate. This is standard stuff for Hanley, an AP environmental reporter since the 1997 Kyoto summit. Hanley has written about how global warming will cause mass migrations and war, and spun a story about the decade's warming, which has virtually plateaued, to make it see as if warming was getting faster. "By year-end 2008, the 2000s already included eight of the 10 warmest years on record. By 2060, that trajectory could push temperatures a dangerous 4 degrees C (7 degrees F) or more higher than preindustrial levels, British scientists said." This is how to lie with a half-truth. Global temps show no clear trend this decade. One of the Climategate emails shows shows what a quandary this posed for scientist Kevin Trenberth: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate." The data are surely wrong. Usually, when data doesn't match a theory, it means the theory needs work. But with the Climategate scientists, it's the other way around. Here's a Sept. 27, 2009 email, that in some detail describes how Tom Wigley wants to change data that showed rapid warming in the 1940s — which he called a "blip" — to make it more in line with predictions of ever-rapid warming. (A fast rise of temps in the first half of the century would call that trend into question): "Here are some speculations on correcting SSTs to partly explain the 1940s warming blip. If a bank did that kind of "correcting" on its balance sheet, the perps would go to jail. Don't expect the environmentally correct Charles J. Hanleys of the world to point this out. Their job is to sound the alarm, not to exercise skepticism, which is supposed to be a virtue in reporters as well as scientists. There is a saying in journalism, "If your mother says she loves you, check it out." Evidently, the Associated Press has never heard of it. Regardless of Climategate, the enviromental journalists, with some honorable exceptions, will double down on producing more alarmist stories about how global warming is disrupting everything on the planet, even threatening caribou. Just keep in mind that what you're getting isn't journalism, it's propaganda. Read their stuff as you would read a Greenpeace press release. Caveat lector. Climategate: Be Skeptical Of Envirojournalism
By: Bradley Fikes — December 5th, 2009
Climategate is an unwelcome gate-crasher at the doomfest. Top climate scientists are caught red-handed discussing how to hide information from skeptics. They hide information that would call man-caused global warming, AGW, into question, as admitted by Michael"Dirty Laundry" Mann. They discuss how to squeeze perceived skeptics out of peer-reviewed journals, and even blackball journals that publish papers skeptical of AGW..
"If you look at the attached plot you will see that the land also shows the 1940s blip (as I'm sure you know).
"So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean — but we'd still have to explain the land blip.
"I've chosen 0.15 here deliberately. This still leaves an ocean blip, and i think one needs to have some form of ocean blip to explain the land blip (via either some common forcing, or ocean forcing land, or vice versa, or all of these). When you look at other blips, the land blips are 1.5 to 2 times (roughly) the ocean blips — higher sensitivity plus thermal inertia effects. My 0.15 adjustment leaves things consistent with this, so you can see where I am coming from." 8 Responses to "Climategate: Be Skeptical Of Envirojournalism"
I hope that the following makes the ClimateGate controversy easier to understand and how only 20 – 30 paleoclimatologists and super computer programming specialists can create the entire "consensus" that man is causing global warming.
ClimateGate emails and computer programs were taken from a main server at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. It is not known if this was a theft or the actions of a whistleblower, disgusted with what the lead scientists at CRU were doing.
ClimateGate exposed the cabal of 20 – 30 scientists (not just at CRU) that peer reviewed each others papers, strong-armed scientific journals to only print their views, and then sat on the IPCC panels as authors judging which published studies go into the IPCC final reports. This is why they always keep shouting "peer reviewed studies, peer reviewed studies, peer reviewed studies". They owned the peer review process.
ClimateGate exposed that this small group has been adding positive corrections to the raw global temperature data, inflating the amount of published temperature rise over the last 50 years. Both CRU in the UK and NASA-GISS in the US add these biases. At CRU, the programmers did not even know what and why some corrections were added every month. Only since satellite monitoring for comparison have the amounts of biasing leveled off.
ClimateGate exposed the leaders of this cabal instructing each other to delete emails, data files, and data analysis programs ahead of already filed Freedom Of Information Act requests for raw data and computer codes, clearly a crime.
ClimateGate exposed the "trick" about the Hockey stick figure and other studies that performed proxy construction of past temperatures. After all, reconstruction of the last 1,000 years of climate is the first step in predicting the future with super computer programs as explained below:
Everything about all 21 super computer programs used by the IPCC to determine future global warming rely on best-determined past sensitivities to solar and volcanic effects (climate forcings) from the proxy temperature record.
1. The elimination of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age (the handle of the hockey stick) was necessary so that past solar effects could be minimized, thereby allowing almost all of the warming in the last 75 years to be blamed on Greenhouse Gasses. Raw data (like tree-ring thickness, radioisotope of mud layers in a lake bottom, ice core analyses, etc.) are used as a proxy for reconstruction of the temperature record for 1000 AD to 1960 AD. To ensure desired results, statistical manipulation of the raw data and selecting only supporting data, cherry-picking, was suspected and later proved to make the hockey stick graph. Look closely at the plot here where the hockey stick is one of the plots:ter.co.uk/2009/11/16/cern_cloud_experiment/
http://www.theregis
2. The slope of long-term 10-year running average global temperature using thermometers from 1900 to present (the blade of the hockey stick) was maximized with the sloppy gridding code, Urban Heat Island effects, hiding the declines, and even fabricating data (documented in the leaked source code comments revealed with ClimateGate). This ensured that the Greenhouse Gas sensitivity coefficients in all 21 of the super computers was maximized, and that maximizes the temperature result at year 2100 based on Greenhouse Gas increases. This thermometer data was used to replace the tree ring-divergence after 1960 and plot this over the climate history data of (1) above giving the false impression that the reconstructed 1000 AD to 1960 AD results are more accurate than they are.
3. Because tuning of the super computer programs uses back casting, the computer outputs could always replicate the 20th Century (by design); therefore it was assumed that the models had almost everything in them. Because of (1) and (2) above, nearly all climate change predicted by the models was due to CO2 and positive feedbacks and hardly any of the climate change was for other reasons like solar, understood or not.
4. Over the years, when better numbers for volcanic effects, black carbon, aerosols, land use, ocean and atmospheric multi-decadal cycles, etc. became available, it appears that CRU made revisions to refit the back cast, but could hardly understand what the code was doing due to previous correction factor fudging and outright fabricating, as documented in the released code as part of ClimateGate.
5. After the IPCC averages the 21 super computer outputs of future projected warming (anywhere from 2-degrees to 7-degrees, not very precise), that output is used to predict all manner of secondary effects / catastrophes. (Fires, floods, droughts, blizzards, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, insects, extinctions, diseases, civil wars, cats & dogs sleeping together, etc.)
This results in massive amounts of government funding for the study of secondary effects, employing tens of thousands of scientists and engineers worldwide, thus the consensus.
So shut-up or be called a denier,
live the way we tell you to live,
pay more for everything, and
just send money for someones research on the effects of global climate change on horseshoe crabs (which have been around for about 440 million years through all possible temperature ranges).
I hope that this makes the ClimateGate controversy easier to understand and how only 20 – 30 paleoclimatologists and super computer programming specialists can create the entire "consensus" that man is causing global warming.
NucEngineer,
Thank you for your detailed post. This is fascinating. You should be an environmental reporter!
[...] you thought I was going to talk about the latest in the ClimateGate debacle along with the desperate and pathetic attempts of the members the Church of AGW to dismiss [...]
There's a lot more to this ClimateGate story. This small (2 to 3 dozen) cabal of climate scientists could not have possibly gotten to this point without extraordinary funding, political support at virtually all levels of government, especially at the national level and unparalleled cooperation from the national and world media. This wide-spread networked support continues even as we the people puzzle over what this is all about. I ask you, "What are you seeing and hearing from our national media on the subject?" Anything? What are you seeing and hearing from all levels of our government, local and regional newspapers and media outlets? Anything of substance? At all of these levels the chatter has remained remarkably quite on the subject, wouldn't you say? Why? What points and positions are you beginning to hear on the radio and see on the television? This cabal of scientists has an unprecedented level of support given the revelations contained in the emails, documented in the computer software code and elaborated in the associated programmer remarks (REM) within the code. And —- this has gone on for years, AND continues even in the presence of the most damning evidence one could imagine, or even hope for. Watergate pales in comparison, given the trillions of dollars in carbon offset taxes, cap & trade fees hanging in the balance and the unimaginable political control over people's lives this all implies. The mainstream media's conspiracy of silence proves the point. Their continued cover-up is as much a part of this crime as the actual scientific fraud. ABC, CBS and NBC are simply co-conspirators exercising their 5th Amendment rights.
Dear Bradley Fikes.
I am writing this from Australia to say thank you for your wonderful writing.
What a breath of fresh air.
It is good to know that there are still some hard-nosed journo's out there working their butts off to tell it like it is.
More is the pity that the MSM simply refuse to touch this issue.
There was a time when Journalists would have punched each other out to get the exclusive on this story,
Nowadays, they sit behind their computer screens sipping cafe latte's and pushing out lazy junk that they haven't even bothered to check out.
Truth in Journalism should be its own badge of honour.
How sad to think Journalists have been reduced to paid propagandists.
Keep up the good work.
Aqua Fyre
The article is excellent and if you notice on any forum or news site where there is commentary about climategate 99 out of 100 individuals are aghast at the fraud and the fact mainstream media are avoiding the story. However, I feel it is all too late and very little can be done to reverse the damage the orchestrated fraud has done. Main stream media just cannot turn around on this story because they were the main drivers and hypsters of climate change propaganda in the noughties. It is no coincidence that Global Warming found its feet in the mainstream press shortly after the Y2K problem passed without a hitch. By this time the MSM needed something equally big and dramatic as Y2k to fill the void. The media knew it, people were hooked on fatalistic news. It hugely increases network audiences, advertising revenue. Climate change has been big business for MSM and even now the fraud is exposed they will fight the truth tooth and nail. I can't see the full truth coming out.
Henry,
Your right in thinking that the full truth coming out.
The sad fact is that there are too many vested interests in keeping this whole scam alive. There is too much money at stake to let the truth demolish the fiction.
Abused by the Rich and ignored by the Media : Truth is the Bastard child of our Age.
Where once it was sought out and cherished, it now lies broken on the wheel of progress. But it is not the sort of progress that was illuminated by the light of reason, but rather, it has become a progress born of shadowing doom.
Sadly, I fear we have entered into a new age of Lysenkoism where Pseudo~science is rewarded by the apparatus of state.
Still, for as long as there are those like you and me who are willing to fight the encroaching darkness, then the light of truth will never be fully extinguished.
Aqua Fyre
Thanks to you, Henry_J and the others for your kind words. It's really sad to see journalists circling the wagons around the circled wagons of the scientists. They don't seem to care that their reputation is also at stake. I'm going to write about this in another post, but just compare this Climategate article in Newsweek with this one in the Weekly Standard. Judge for yourself which one explains more about what the emails mean.